Executive Summary

This report recommends that Duke University expand efforts to acknowledge, engage with and activate its past, and include ties to slavery, white supremacy and segregation; unfair and discriminatory labor practices; benefits from a lethal product, tobacco; and discrimination against women, LGBTQIA+ and disabled people and people of color. Duke should also seek to identify and celebrate our diverse forbears, among them those who integrated the university and pressed for justice, advocated for fair labor treatment and worked to better society.

A more intentional and inclusive process would reflect our highest goals as a university, to promote knowledge and put it at the service of society, including our own. In the words of Duke President Vincent Price, “only through empathy, righteous witness and a conviction to learn from the past can we ensure that the arc of the moral universe bends ever closer to justice.”

Addressing how the past appears on campus and should appear is part of that righteous witness. This process should include a review of the physical campus, with the purpose of evaluating existing sites and names and proposing new sites and names that more accurately convey the university’s deep values and educational mission. Our history also merits examination, for both the university’s long-standing commitment to the betterment of society and past injustices that continue to shape our present. This process should not be seen as a burden, but an opportunity to engage our community in constructive action to build a more equitable and just future. Engaging with the past is and should be an on-going, dynamic part of our educational mission.

That process is urgent. Students logged over 325 sites where Duke represents its history. At least 53 per cent represent white men. Among them are slave-owners and white supremacists, among them Braxton Craven and Julian S. Carr, whose name is on the East Campus Building housing the History department.

Women are represented in less than 15 per cent of Duke’s sites. Of all sites, only eight represent staff. As far as our data shows, all of those staff members were or are white.

Seventy per cent of Duke’s sites represent white people of any gender. Excluding repeats of individuals, less than 3 per cent of sites represent black people. Asians or Asian-Americans are represented in roughly 1 per cent of all Duke sites. Native Americans are represented in 0.003 per cent of sites (one student is named in a section of one exhibit). Apart from the Center for Gender and Sexual Diversity, there are two LGBTQIA+ sites: Walt Whitman, who had no relationship to Duke; and Prof. Reynolds Price, who is usually not recognized as queer, a term he preferred. We found no sites representing Latinx members of the Duke community.

This report shares some of the perspective of Duke’s Commission on Memory and History. In their final report, the Commissioners stated that Duke’s guiding principle when addressing its history “must be its commitment to teaching, learning, and scholarship.” The Commissioners recognize that the campus itself is a potent teaching tool, and that sites provide important and unique learning opportunities. The soaring spire of Duke Chapel conveys the high purpose of education. Statues of Washington, James B. and Benjamin Duke reflect valued roots in commerce and philanthropy.

But other sites honor slave-owners and white supremacists. Sites are in part a civic language, and in sites like these we continue to honor long-discredited ideas, among them white and male supremacy. As our Bass Connections team discovered during our research, as important as existing sites are the sites we wish were on Duke’s campus. So much of our history remains uncelebrated, a lapse we should be eager to rectify. As a community, we have an opportunity to create new sites to honor those pioneers and movements that transformed our university community for the better.​To be truly welcoming to a diverse faculty, staff and student body, the university must invest in physical changes that acknowledge the past and honor those who fought to make Duke University a better place. This could include the removal of some sites and names with appropriate context and explanation; the addition of new sites and names for overlooked or under-valued members of our community; new site and naming policies; and a robust program of education and information that includes tours, faculty and student orientation, public events and classes.